Articles tagged with: Pensions

Reports the New York Times: Faced with growing budget deficits and restive taxpayers, elected officials from Maine to Alabama, Ohio to Arizona, are pushing new legislation to limit the power of labor unions, particularly those representing government workers, in collective…

Reported the Rockford Star-Ledger: When it comes to pensions in Illinois, a day can mean all the difference in the world.Thanks to the eight-month span between Gov. Pat Quinn’s approval of a pension reform bill last spring and its implementation,…

What do you contribute to your pension? Maybe put aside a few bucks here and there? Then you’ll be happy to know that we, the taxpayers, contribute $55,000 a year for lawmakers’ pensions. Gov. Pat Quinn does even better, receiving…

This story from the New York Times will not brighten your day. It’s about a national concern that’s growing about the financial future of the states in the worst financial crisis and what that situation could mean to the nation…

from National Taxpayers United of Illinois: ROCKFORD–A new report by pension researcher Bill Zettler reveals that retired government employees in Winnebago County receive lavish, gold-plated pensions that far exceed actual wages of workers in the private sector. “These government-employee pensions…

From the National Review
Every taxpayer in the United States will be partly on the hook for Illinois’s fiscal incontinence. That’s because they’re also using something called “Build America Bonds,” a financial instrument created by Obama’s stimulus bill, to fund what amounts to a social-services program under the guise of a “capital project.” Build America Bonds are like municipal bonds, except that the profits are taxable — sort of. In the first version of Build America, the federal government paid 35 percent of the interest on the bonds. In the current …

Shortly before Tim Baldermann retired as Chicago Ridge’s police chief, the town boosted his salary by more than$70,000, handing the 44-year-old as big a paycheck in retirement as he earned full time on the police force.

The deputy police chief, who sat on the pension board, received a similar deal. As it did for Baldermann, the town added Dennis Kapelinski’s unused vacation time to his final salary — in exchange for opting out of insurance coverage — and gave him a 20 percent raise just before he retired, documents show.
Baldermann, who …

No one likes a good story about pensions to get his heat pumping as much as I do, or if you are Rich Miller, it gets your blood boiling to have Illinois referred to as “Greece by the Lake Michigan” in the New York Times (after consultation with the decidedly non-Greek. and coincidentally primary candidate Dan Hynes, of all people). Miller wants to know who said that, which probably won’t fix the budget and pension problems in Illinois, so I thought we could go on a different tack.
I am a …

Dale Rosenthal, a former strategist for Long Term Capital Management, the hedge fund known for its epic collapse in 1998, and a proprietary trader for Morgan Stanley, has seen his share of financial complexities.

But when shown a seven-page list of derivatives positions held by the Illinois Teachers Retirement System as of March 31, obtained by Medill News Service through a Freedom of Information Act request, the University of Illinois-Chicago assistant professor of finance expressed disbelief.
“If you were to have faxed me this balance sheet and asked me to guess who …

As Illinois citizens struggle with the severe economic downturn plaguing the state, Illinois public school employees enjoy another record year of salaries, fringe benefits and pensions. See “Top 100 Teachers Salaries.”

Apparently there is no tax money for the barren shelves at food pantries or the lack of beds at homeless shelters or to extend unemployment benefits but there is enough tax money to pay: